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I'll be traveling to the United States soon, and I've read that civil asset forfeiture laws may allow customs agents to take/keep crypto currencies. Is there an easy way to keep my wallet safe from confiscation? I have a Trezor, but I'm not sure how best to travel with it. Should I keep coins on an exchange while traveling? Move them to a paper wallet or my laptop?
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The Trezor (and other hardware wallets) use the BIP 39 specification for the recovery mnemonic. If your device is confiscated, you can use the recovery mnemonic to restore your wallet to another Trezor, hardware wallet, or software wallet. From there you can access your Bitcoin.
Ah, that's reassuring. I need to look up how to recover my wallet to another device and make sure I understand the steps and have everything before its needed. My Trezor is holding a couple different types of coins, each with amounts across a few addresses. If I do recover, will I need to restore each individual coin & address? – anonoHODL – 2017-12-13T10:11:59.343
The recovery mnemonic encodes all of the information necessary to generate all of the private keys and addresses that your Trezor will ever use. By using that, you can restore all of your addresses and all other coins which use BIP 39 and BIP 32 (BIP 32 is the derivation method that generates all private keys and addresses). – Andrew Chow – 2017-12-13T16:36:11.037
Great question. I wouldn't temporarily use an exchange. Use trezor's multiple hidden wallet method and don't forget to check out the pro-tip. Probably another Trezor user knows what I'm talking about and can write a decent answer – Christiaan Westerbeek – 2017-12-12T21:37:08.477